A riot was declared in downtown Portland, Oregon on Saturday evening as the city exploded into its worst protest violence of the Trump era, as Antifa Communists showed they are receiving clear favoritism from City Hall.

More than 150 supporters of the conservative Patriot Prayer group fought pitched street battles with scores of Communist Antifa protesters. In total, nine people were arrested.

The march had started near Schrunk Plaza in the city center, where the conservative group had held a rally, led by the Patriot Prayer founder and Republican US Senate candidate Joey Gibson, reports KATU.

As soon as the group left the plaza, they clashed with Antifa Communists who had been waiting across a heavily barricaded street nearby.

As the two groups came to blows, Department of Homeland Security officers fired non-lethal ammunition towards the counter-protest.

Later the groups met on another street nearby, where the worst of the violence took place.

Patriot Prayer supporters – many of whom wore the colors of a group called Proud Boys – were seen defending themselves by hitting counter-protesters with flagpoles, trash can lids, and their fists after IED attacks by the Antifa Communists.

One Proud Boy was seen to floor an Antifa Communist with a single punch. Later in the day he was seen being cuffed by police officers.

The Antifa Communists, some clad in “black bloc” clothing and masks, released deafening fireworks, initiating an assault on Patriot Prayer supporters.

While Antifa Communists used pepper spray, Patriot Prayer members had been unable to take theirs into a federal park because they, unlike Antifa, were searched prior to entering.

The melee lasted several minutes before Portland police revoked the permit for the march and cleared the street. The groups clashed again soon after and police used pepper spray to separate them and declared a riot at 6.15pm local time.

People in both groups suffered head and facial wounds in the fighting.

Patriot Prayer protesters made their way back to Schrunk Plaza and vented their rage in speeches.

Regular Patriot Prayer rally attendee Katherine Townsend told the group that Portland police had “set us up”, and accused them of “disarming us and herding us towards antifa”.

Townsend said: “It’s not Portland any more, it’s Portlantifa.” But she and other members of Patriot Prayer said they would come back to the city to assert their message of “freedom of speech”.

Gibson said they would “storm city hall” if necessary to get their message heard.

Unlike recent protests, many participants on the Patriot Prayer side had travelled from around the country, after Gibson issued a national call for assistance.

In a statement, Portland police’s deputy chief, Bob Day, said: “Portland police planned for today’s protest so that people could exercise their first amendment rights to speech and assembly.

“However, once projectiles, such as fireworks, eggs, rocks, bottles and construction equipment were thrown and people were injured, we ordered people to disperse.”

A spokesman for the Communist groups organizing the counter-protest spewed blatantly obvious lies, Rose City Antifa, said they were “not surprised by the level of violence, given Patriot Prayer’s rhetoric on social media in the lead-up to the rally”. He failed to mention all of the violence was initiated by his side.

Revolutionary Student Front – Austin is a self described “revolutionary anti-capitalist student movement” that organizes at the University of Texas – Austin. This militant student group recently made headlines for holding self-defense training on campus and tweeting about killing police officers. Earlier this month they published a comprehensive document outlining their so-called “Revolutionary Mental Health Program (RMHP)”. This 13,000+ word document covers the formulation, goals, failures, and successes of this program and why the ultimately decided to end it . Below are some of the more alarming excerpts from this document:

Their stated goal for this program was to address the mental health needs of student and to ultimately recruit and radicalize students with mental health issues in order to “make them into active fighters”:

“The primary goal of this program was to address the mental health needs of students in a way that would primarily serve to politicize and strengthen them, to become more committed to revolution and more capable of carrying it out.”

Through many hours of discussion with students while tabling and at our public meetings, and through regular contact with disgruntled students, we uncovered numerous pressing needs facing the general student body and working-class students alike. From this point, we sought to determine a site of struggle that would appeal to the sections of the student population most ripe for radicalization and to develop a plan to address those needs in a way that would politicize these students, with the goal of course being to make them into active fighters in the revolutionary class struggle.”

Communist insurgent terrorists, or “antifa,” increasingly mobilized in the wake of President Trump’s election, are unapologetic about what they describe as the necessary use of violence to combat authoritarianism, as they try to install an authoritarian system to replace the government of the United States.

While both experts on the movement and terrorists within it emphasize that not everyone who participates in Communist Antifa insurgency engages in violence, they say the use of force is intrinsic to their political philosophy.

“The justification [of the use of violence] is that Nazi ideology at its very core is founded on violence and on wielding power by any means,” said Mike Isaacson, one of the founders of Smash Racism D.C., an antifa organization in Washington.

Interestingly enough, that simple statement revealed that they have modeled themselves after the Socialist Nazi Brownshirts, while pretending to adopt a Soviet anti-Nazi stance.

Isaacson is unequivocal in his defense of violence as a legitimate tool to combat the creeping threat of what he deems authoritarianism.

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